Nobody remembers or cares about John Avildsen’s Neighbors (’81), a John Belushi vs. Dan Aykroyd comedy which played fast and loose (to put it mildly) with Thomas Berger’s same-titled novel, described on the Wikipage as “a satire of manners and suburbia, and a comment on emotional alienation with echoes of the works of Franz Kafka.” Everyone called it lowbrow and not that funny. But compare the tone of the trailers for the Avildsen vs. the upcoming Nicholas Stoller film with Seth Rogen, Zac Effron and Rose Byrne. The former almost seems like an Ernst Lubitsch film compared to the newbie, which seems like a metaphor for the downmarket mongrelization of mainstream comedy.
